Lots More on the Coming 20-Year Storm with Viktor Shvets

The election of Donald Trump, with his promise of more tariffs and a much tighter stance on immigration is a source of major macro uncertainty. To some it marks the end of a certain neoliberal consensus about globalization, and the pre-eminent role played by financial markets. According to today's guest, we're at the beginning of a long, turbulent period that may not be resolved for two decades to come. On this episode, we speak with macro strategist Viktor Shvets, and author of the new book, The Twilight Before the Storm: From the Fractured 1930s to Today's Crisis Culture. He talks about the big rethink that's underway on a whole host of issues that pertain to the global economy, starting with trade, and why it will take years for the dust to settle. Become a Bloomberg.com subscriber using our special intro offer at bloomberg.com/podcastoffer. You’ll get episodes of this podcast ad-free and exclusive access to our daily Odd Lots newsletter. Already a subscriber? Connect your account on the Bloomberg channel page in Apple Podcasts to listen ad-free. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Finance is increasingly being built on digital rails. But as the adoption of virtual assets, tokenization and stable coins grows, can regulation not only keep pace but help accelerate it? Find out more later in the podcast.

• 0:15Speaker 01

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• 0:43Speaker 01

  Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts, radio, news.

• 0:48Tracy Alloway?

  Joe, it started.

• 0:50Joe Weisenthal?

  It started.

• 0:50Tracy Alloway?

  It's what, like two, three weeks later?

• 0:53Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, so we had, yeah, three weeks basically since the election and the trade war, at least to some extent, maybe a trade skirmish. We don't really know what's going to happen. It's kind of begun, it started last night.

• 1:04Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, so Trump, he didn't tweet, he said on Truth Social. Is that what it's called?

• 1:10Joe Weisenthal?

  And by the way, I respect that he still uses Truth Social.

• 1:13Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, kind of a slap in the face to Elon Musk, I guess.

• 1:18Joe Weisenthal?

  I did a deadlift. One, two, three.

• 1:21Tracy Alloway?

  Head Jimmy. Okay.

• 1:22Joe Weisenthal?

  One, two.

• 1:23Tracy Alloway?

  Gemini, barges.

• 1:25Joe Weisenthal?

  This is an after school special, except.

• 1:27Tracy Alloway?

  I've decided I'm going to base my entire personality going forward on campaigning for a strategic pork reserve in the US.

• 1:33Joe Weisenthal?

  Where's the best squid ink pasta?

• 1:35Tracy Alloway?

  These are the important questions. Is it robots taking over the world?

• 1:38Joe Weisenthal?

  No, I think that like in a couple of years, the AI will do a really good job of making the Odd Lots podcast. And people are saying, I don't really need to listen to Joe and Tracy anymore. We do have.

• 1:50Tracy Alloway?

  Cha-ching.

• 1:51Speaker 04

  The perfect guest.

• 1:53Joe Weisenthal?

  Welcome to Lots More, where we catch up with friends about what's going on right now.

• 1:57Tracy Alloway?

  Because even when Odd Lots is over, there's always lots more.

• 2:02Joe Weisenthal?

  And we really do have the perfect guest.

• 2:06Tracy Alloway?

  But he said he's thinking about, or he's going to impose 10% tariffs on goods from China and 25% tariffs on goods from Mexico and Canada for some reason.

• 2:20Joe Weisenthal?

  By the way, we're recording this November 26th, Tuesday, and he specifically tied those tariff threats to Mexico and Canada, to which various conditions that theoretically can be met related to immigration crackdowns and the flow of drugs across the border.

• 2:38Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, so this is the thing that's being debated in markets right now. To what extent is this a negotiating tactic? You know, you come in with a big threat and you start from there and you sort of whittle it down. Or again, how serious is Trump actually about this?

• 2:52Speaker 05

  Well, I think it's both domestic and international in a sense that if you think what drives it and why the likes of Bernie Sanders and the likes of Donald Trump read the mood of American people much more than institutionalized people like Biden or Harris is really to do what I describe, actually, Daniel Roderick of Harvard University described as a political trilemma of global economy. You cannot have globalization and economic integration, nation states and democracy all at the same time. You can pick up two out of the three, but you can't have all three and you can't have all at the same time. So if you think of domestic and international pressures, I think Trump is reflecting both

• 3:37Speaker 05

  of them. If you go back in time, it's really Paul Walker deregulating global financial system, followed by Bill Clinton in 1994 NAFTA, followed by China entering WTO in 2001, have created an environment where people feel, justifiably or not, but they feel that their jobs, their livelihoods somehow were stolen by other people. And so this is response to that, to say to people, I am looking after you. I am trying to protect it. But at the same time, there is also inflationary element that I think Trump fully understand,

• 4:17Speaker 05

  or he must fully understand, that the principal reason why Biden lost was inflation. And so the question is, when you start imposing those tariffs, you have to remember that up to half of all US imports are intermediate goods. So if you actually impose tariffs, you're taxing your own manufacturers and your own exporters. So there is an element of domestic and international.

• 4:41Tracy Alloway?

  We are here with Victor Schwetz. He is, of course, a global strategist and author of the new book, The Twilight Before the Storm: How to Avoid a World on Fire. World on Fire sounds kind of ominous.

• 4:55Joe Weisenthal?

  Not great.

• 4:55Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah. Well, since you mentioned the tensions in the neoliberal order, or what remains of it, what do you see on the horizon? Like, what political system are we actually on course for?

• 5:08Speaker 05

  Well, that's a great question. One of the things my new book explores is that the last time we had the same degree of disequilibrium or polarization was really in 1930s. And back then, there were three systems on a menu. You could choose communism, you could choose fascism, or you could choose constrained democracy. It wasn't a choice between freedom or liberty. It was just a question, how much freedom do we need to sacrifice in order to lower the tensions and defang the extremes? So today, in a very similar position, the world as a whole does not agree on what is the right social policies, political system, economic systems, business systems.

• 5:49Speaker 05

  And if we don't agree what is the right thing to do, alternatives proliferate. So today, there are various alternatives competing against each other, whether it's China, Russia, Iran, US trying to redefine what it is, Europe is trying to redefine what it is. And we're in this period, which might last up to a decade, where ultimately, we will find a compromise. Ultimately, there will be consensus that will be established. And the only question the book asks, do we need to go through the world of fire of 1940s? Or can we just go straight into the 1950s and forget the 1940s?

• 6:25Tracy Alloway?

  I'd sign up for the 1950s.

• 6:26Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, I'd choose the latter path. When you presented your trilemma, so just globalization, the nation-state as we know it, and democracy. And you mentioned that candidates like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, both to some extent, for better or worse, correct? Correctly or incorrectly, there is the economic vulnerability that perhaps people feel. But it also sounds, when you say nation state specifically, and when you contrasting that against globalization, it sounds like there is, yes, there is an economic impulse, anxiety, security, et cetera. But also this notion of legitimate sovereignty of a nation. A nation has the right to control its borders to some degree and to modulate and turn the dial on who can get in or out.

• 7:11Joe Weisenthal?

  It has the right, we see this in the war in Ukraine, the legitimate right to have a military. And a precondition to having a military is some sort of domestic manufacturing capacity to build weapons.

• 7:23Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 7:24Joe Weisenthal?

  It feels like there's a big element of what's being debated now in the US specifically is the re-exercise of sovereignty across a number of different dimensions.

• 7:34Speaker 05

  Totally, totally. I mean, if you think of, I usually describe it as three I's. Inflation, inequalities, immigration.

• 7:42Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 7:42Speaker 05

  If you think of those three elements, if you combine them, that pretty much explains almost everything you need to know. So if inflation was much lower, in a sense of absolute prices have come down to a level that people regard as acceptable. If inequalities, whether it's wealth or income, were much better managed. If immigration was not a major issue, either in Europe or in the United States. Most other issues, whether it's cultural wars or anything else, will just fade into oblivion. So in other words, the cultural issues color how you look at those three I's. And so if you do not fix inflation, if you do not fix inequalities, and if you do not fix immigration and control of your borders,

• 8:26Speaker 05

  then culture issues become even more dominant, driving you to a certain conclusion.

• 8:32Tracy Alloway?

  Speaking of the culture wars, one thing I wanted to ask you from an investment perspective is we have also seen them kind of creep in to the corporate sector where companies basically are forced into choosing a side. So for instance, Tractor Supply rolled back its DEI initiatives. There was the Bud Light. Boycott and then Coors Light, I think.

• 8:55Joe Weisenthal?

  Walmart just last night.

• 8:56Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, really?

• 8:57Joe Weisenthal?

  Yep, this was a big news just last night. Walmart becomes, I'm reading an NPR headline. Walmart becomes latest and biggest company to roll back DEI policies. I think that's huge.

• 9:05Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, that's massive. And how do investors handle like the politicization of companies that at one point said they were just out to maximize shareholder returns and now seem to be doing something else?

• 9:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's exactly what my book discusses, that the idea neoliberal philosophy that really become embedded in late 1970s, early 1980s, really died around the global financial crisis around 2010. Over the last decade or 15 years, we'll all be trying to find, as I said, what is a new societal consensus? How important are corporates, private sector, public sector? What responsibilities does they have? So the idea of Milton Friedman, that the primary objective of a corporate is to generate returns to shareholders, actually died around 2019, when US Business Council already redefine objectives. But right now, societies still don't agree what is right, what is wrong?

• 10:01Speaker 05

  And so corporates are trying to be careful because corporates are nothing more than an outgrowth of societies they're in. I think one of the things I mentioned in the book, if societies decided that burning witches is the right thing to do, we probably would have been burning witches. And so corporates have to reflect society. And so what you find corporates try to find the middle ground, somewhere between extremes. However, as I said early on, five, 10 years from now, and I kept looking in this book into millennium and Z generations, and what those generations actually want to have as they become the dominant voting bloc. Because today, they're only around 30% of the votes.

• 10:43Speaker 05

  When they become a dominant voting bloc, they will identify exactly the frontier, the borders. How far you can go, where should you go? And at that point in time, the corporates could actually solidify. But right now, they're in a flux. They're reflecting purely societal flux.

• 11:01Joe Weisenthal?

  It feels to me like when Trump won. In 2016, corporations, in a way, they're like, you know what? The election happened, but we're going to continue on. This doesn't change our commitments to net zero. This doesn't change our commitments to diversity. This doesn't change our commitments to gender equality and so forth. It feels like, A, they're following the mood of the election much more this time. I was really struck by a utility company the day after the election say, yeah, we're probably going to burn more coal now. In line with changing regulations, you see the Walmart news three weeks afterwards. I want to get into something else about the three I's. There are tensions among them. And how much does the American way of life, the middle class or the upper middle class

• 11:44Joe Weisenthal?

  way of life, in some way, you know, there's a lot of tension about the cost of living. How much, though, is it somewhat predicated on inequality and the ongoing influx of cheap immigrant labor to sustain what people expect is the sort of like comfortable middle class to upper middle class life here?

• 12:02Speaker 05

  Totally. One thing, whenever Donald Trump discusses current account deficits, I'm not sure he fully realizes it's an accounting identity. The deficit of one country is equal to surplus of another country. Unless we start trading with Mars or extraterrestrials, exports and inputs, surpluses and deficits has to line up. And so one of the things the incoming Treasury Secretary is discussing is basically unwinding Paul Walker's revolution, which led to significant discontinuities. In other words, some countries been accumulating significant surpluses.

• 12:37Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 12:38Speaker 05

  Other countries were accumulating significant deficits. So one thing American people probably don't realize that they can't just maintain consumption at the current level and still not run the deficits. At the same time, if Americans run the deficits, by definition, China, Germany, Japan have to run the surpluses.

• 12:56Joe Weisenthal?

  But just on the immigration component as well, how much does the US standard of living as we know it and our service sector labor, restaurants? I mean, I'm thinking back to the immediate post pandemic period when we had this fairly modest labor market tightening and people Went ballistic about the quality of service they were getting in restaurants because workers didn't immediately go back to their jobs at the pace that was expected.

• 13:20Tracy Alloway?

  It would be very ironic if Trump won because of post pandemic inflation caused by labor tightness in part and then part of his administration is basically imposing a new form of labor market tightness.

• 13:33Speaker 05

  Well, that's, that's right, but you also have to separate politics, optical illusion, what you're trying to do and the reality. If you remember, well, you don't remember, but anyway, Eisenhower in Operation, I think it was called Wedpack Operation, which is a horrible name. But anyway, Eisenhower expelled 1.1 million Mexicans in 1950s, only to see them all trickling back into the country in a matter of months and years. So you have to separate politics, what you're trying to do, optical illusion you're trying to create, and the reality of what is actually being achieved. My view is that there is sufficient guardrails in a system in the US to prevent probably the worst outcomes that potentially could have happened. Now, the first

• 14:17Speaker 05

  clearly guardrail is electoral process. US is one of those countries that elections never end. I mean, they just carry on all the time. So if you think of inauguration in January, within 12 months, everybody will be in a midterm mode. Everybody will be discussing what's going to happen to midterm. So if you're not careful and you're causing significant frictions in the labor market, significant tightening, some inflation coming back, you have to roll back your policies. But there are other areas. Capital markets is a classic example. That's why you get your Treasury Secretary, hedge fund manager, because at the end of the day, markets are bigger than individuals and they're bigger even than the underlying economies. So any distress that you're going

• 15:00Speaker 05

  to see in risk premia, in mortgage rates, in interest rates, or anything like that, they will have to pedal back a lot. So what that basically implies, there is a friction here between political objectives, what you're trying to do, what you genuinely believe, and I think Trump probably does believe it's a good idea to expel those people out of the country, any economic reality, inflationary reality. That you're going to face. Don't also forget commercial and corporate interests like he's talking about getting rid of CHIPS Act or IRA Act. Over eighty percent of the money in those acts went into the red districts. Yeah. Which are represented in Congress, which has a tiny majority. You're really looking at only four or five seats. They're going to have in a majority in the Congress. So there is constant tension.

• 15:45Speaker 05

  Now that tension will create volatilities inevitably. They're going to create currency volatilities. They're going to create equity volatilities, interest rate volatilities. So that's inevitable. But the hope is that the gut rails between electoral cycles, tiny majority in a Congress, between corporate interests, the capital markets, stickiness of institutions. Remember, you can't just unscramble a lot of the commitments that the United States have. Whether it's a WTO, whether it's NATO, whether it's UN, whether it's NAFTA, you can't really do that. That there is enough there that, as I said, tariffs are not going to go up to twenty percent. They will increase from three, four to maybe six, seven, eight, but they're not going to twenty.

• 16:28Speaker 05

  You're going to not be expelling millions of people. Labor force increase will shrink, but probably no more than twenty five, thirty percent, rather than a much more robust numbers that could have occurred. And that should moderate some of the inflationary outcomes and economic outcomes.

• 16:57Speaker 00

  What's next for virtual assets? I'm Jacob Grease, host of Economy Scale, a series exploring growth in key global sectors. And this episode, we're diving into the digital forces shaping finance. Sean McHugh from Dubai-based Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority has this to say.

• 17:13Speaker 06

  We're seeing a lot of institutional players come in, digital asset dedicated hedge funds, high frequency traders and that sort of thing. And folks who service institutional clients.

• 17:22Speaker 00

  As more capital enters the market, adaptive regulation is likely to become increasingly key. Reece Merrick of Ripple says.

• 17:30Speaker 07

  A lot of regulators globally would like to keep the industry at arm's length. That's the opposite here. I think also what you'll find is that regulation and frameworks can come out, but some of them are maybe a slight iteration on some 80-year-old policy and not actually in line with what the technology can do and offer. And again, that's very different in Dubai.

• 17:49Speaker 00

  Listen to the full episode wherever you get your podcasts. This series is brought to you by Bloomberg Media Studios and the Dubai Department of Economy and Tourism.

• 17:57Speaker 01

  With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. When you're running a business and looking to expand, you need a clear view of the landscape before making any decisions. ChatGPT can help you prepare. Connect your Google Drive, point to relevant files and reports, and ask chat to research competitors, industry forecasts, and market signals. It can turn the findings into a strategic deck in your team's template that you can review before presenting to your leadership team. Growing a business is ambitious, and ChatGPT can help you do it with confidence. Get started at chatgpt.com.

• 18:35Tracy Alloway?

  You said earlier that the 1930s were your preferred historical analogy to our current time period. And one thing that happened in the 1930s was also tariffs and the Smoot-Hawley Act. And then we had retaliation.

• 18:50Speaker 05

  And expulsion of all the illegals, too.

• 18:52Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, oh, so it happened.

• 18:53Speaker 05

  The US was doing six times expulsions in 1930s than they were doing in 1920s.

• 18:58Tracy Alloway?

  Oh, wow. So it happened, there was a big wave in the 1930s and the 1950s?

• 19:02Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 19:03Tracy Alloway?

  Okay, America has a long history of expelling immigrants.

• 19:06Speaker 05

  But not just the US was expelling in 1930s. So was Germany, so was many other countries. So desire to close the borders, the desire to expel foreigners, the desire to establish tariffs, protect local interests, it was all prevalent in 1930s.

• 19:24Tracy Alloway?

  But what I was going to ask is, how worried are you or what's the potential for retaliation by other countries? Because we've obviously been focused on the US. Everyone is focused on what Trump is doing, but he is not the only actor here.

• 19:39Speaker 05

  No, he is not. And that's one of the issues that, and I think he probably understands it if he's been negotiating with anybody, he has to understand it, that the other side will try not to reciprocate aggressively, primarily because of the size and importance of the US domestic market. But you can't push them too far. You have to find that middle ground. And that's where discussion of negotiating tactics that I think you started from, I think, comes in. That I, I do think that the US side understands that you have to find a compromise. And that compromise optically should look better for the United States. It's like if you're seeing renegotiation of NAFTA back in 2017, 2018.

• 20:24Speaker 05

  It hasn't actually changed a lot. But optically, it was presented as a much better case for the United States going forward. So you need to find that sort of a middle ground. If you don't, if you actually do become aggressive, as it happened in 1930s, yes, you could have retaliatory actions very quickly. That's one of the things I keep highlighting that today, people are angry. People are polarized, but they're not yet mad enough to burn down the house. Whereas in 1930s, they were really mad. In other words, they were exacerbating primarily because the degree of suffering that actually people encountered in 1930s was significantly worse than anything we're experiencing.

• 21:07Speaker 05

  So people are not happy, but they don't want to burn down the house yet. That may be another war, another pandemic, and people will be really angry. But that is not today. So if people are not angry, they're pulling back the politicians within their countries. Also, because people are not angry, geopolitical tensions are kept under some degree of control. It's only when people magnify extremes that both geopolitical tensions and domestic tensions get out of control. And I don't think we're at that point yet. I said, we might be at some point in time, but not today.

• 21:42Joe Weisenthal?

  One of the things, and it came up during the first Trump administration significantly, and it's almost certainly going to come up now, and I mentioned sovereignty and an element of sovereignty is having a military and an element of having a military is having a domestic weapons manufacturing economy. Trump has put a lot of pressure on the Europeans allies specifically to spend more on defense, very angry at their military budgets, their lack of military budgets, et cetera. And, you know, in the dream society of peace, no one has to spend too much on military. How inflationary is that? If you know there's this perception that the US is going to pull back the security umbrella, so to speak, if there's this trade pressure, spend more.

• 22:27Joe Weisenthal?

  If there is a major rearmament, even setting aside war, which of course would be costly on multiple levels, if there is this sort of major impulse among governments around the world, oh, we do have to spend more, maybe we can't rely on the US, maybe the US is putting stress on us, maybe we have to be more anxious about further Russian expansion. What does this do economically if more countries feel this pressure?

• 22:48Speaker 05

  It depends on the extent, because one of the things I discussed in the book in 1950s and 60s, there was no inflation. In fact, inflation didn't pick up until 68, 69, and then much more into 1970s. At the time, military spending globally were about 5%, 6% of GDP. Some countries were up to 7%. Today, global military spending already up to about 2.2%, 2.3%. So in other words, we're spending more on defense than R and D, for example, on the global basis already. In the US, we're up to about 3.5%, 3.6% of GDP. If all we're going to do is go up to maybe 5, and Europeans may go up to about 3, there

• 23:31Speaker 05

  will be no inflationary impact at all. But if you have a much hotter conflicts, that's where military spending goes up to 15%, 20%, 30%, 40% of GDP. So for example, in the World War I, US was spending 15% of GDP. In World War II, at the peak in 1944, US was spending 40%. Of GDP on defense. If you think of countries like Britain or Japan, they were spending up to eighty percent of GDP on defense. So when you get to that level, normal economy just collapses. It's just war economy. That's all you're dealing with. So long as we're staying around the area of the Cold War of nineteen fifty's, nineteen sixty's,

• 24:13Speaker 05

  that is, we're spending maybe five percent of GDP on defense. I do not believe there will be any significant inflationary impact.

• 24:21Tracy Alloway?

  Despite all the scary things that we're talking about and the fact that you mentioned the world on fire as part of your book title. You kind of end the book on an optimistic note and you talk about things maybe getting better, specifically in the nineteen forty's. Maybe we'll get a big productivity boost and our social values will change and, you know, we could have a three day work week or something like that. Of course, the irony is that I'll be retired by the nineteen forty's, right when that comes. Oh, sorry.

• 24:52Joe Weisenthal?

  You're going to have to unretire in the nineteen fifty's.

• 24:54Tracy Alloway?

  Sorry.

• 24:55Joe Weisenthal?

  When your, when your retirement portfolio gets eaten away.

• 24:58Tracy Alloway?

  Yeah, like why the twenty forty's specifically? And then like what causes you to be optimistic, given everything that's going on? Make me feel better.

• 25:09Speaker 05

  Well, the way, the way I look at it, a human history is very convoluted and very complex, quite often contradictory. I like Kevin Drum phrase that I keep using constantly in the book. He's a blogger from California. When he said humans are just overclocked primates, that beneath a very thin layer of civilization lies five million years of primate evolution and therefore we are still bound by it.

• 25:34Joe Weisenthal?

  You were supposed to say something comforting.

• 25:36Speaker 05

  We, we, we are tribal, we are, we are subject to dominance displays and all the rest of it. And so human history is, is very complex, but one thing we've learned that over time, we overcome those challenges. Over time, productivity rises. Over time, output increases, health scale improves. You know, longevity improves and there is no reason why at all to believe that this period will not be followed by this nirvana at some point in time. Why twenty years from now? To me, that's a process at the time you need in order to achieve two things. Number one, a sustainable increase in productivity. So in other words, it's not just one country grows productivity because they're eating demand from other countries and other countries are stagnating.

• 26:19Speaker 05

  But you actually have a global increase in productivity. To me, we're still residing on the bottom of the U curve, which means we have not yet figured it out how to use technology sufficiently to maintain aggregate demand, to avoid unemployment and to drive productivity all at the same time. But over a period of the next decade or two, we will find a way to do it. Now, that probably will imply a lot of people will not have a jobs. Probably many of us will not be even working. But the productivity probably will be four or five percent, six percent per annum instead of something closer to one percent we have right now. So that's the first area. The second area is generational change. Because there is a reason why baby boomers, the next generation behave as they do.

• 27:04Speaker 05

  You know, give me freedom, give me the rope and I can either hang myself or succeed. Give me an opportunity without determining outcomes. And the reason why that is so? Because they no longer have a fear. They've never seen chaos. Yeah. They've never seen bad stuff. And therefore, they assume that institutions of state or the environment will always be there. It's like the air you breathe, you don't think about it. But the younger generation, those who are today thirty years old, thirty-five years old, twenty-five years old, twenty years old, they actually have seen quite a lot of bad stuff occurring, from global financial crisis to never-ending wars to pandemics. They've seen a lot of bad stuff, not at the level that people who are growing up in the

• 27:47Speaker 05

  thirties and forties saw, but nevertheless, quite a lot of bad stuff. And so the question is, when this younger people become an electoral majority across most developed countries, what sort of world would they like to have? And to me, all this serves as a pointing to much more state-driven world, much more community-driven world. Even if you think of Republican Party today, or Democratic Party, Republican Party today is not. Not Ronald Reagan's Republicans, they're not Eisenhower Republicans. They accept that neoliberal framework is incorrect. The only difference between Democrats and Republicans is whether the role of the state will be indirectly through tariffs, through something else, or whether directly through

• 28:30Speaker 05

  investments, the way the Democrats wanted to do. But both of them essentially agree that the state role will increase, not decrease. The level at which state will penetrate your life in various forms, whether it's adjudicating discussions, whether anything else, will change. So to me, this 20-year period, number one, allowed time to raise productivity, and number two, allowed time for societies to call us around a consensus. And as I said, 20 years is about the right time when things will get much, much better, in my view.

• 29:02Tracy Alloway?

  All right, Joe, we're gonna have to wait for 20 years.

• 29:05Joe Weisenthal?

  I love, so we're gonna, things are gonna get better because we're really all primates and the next generation doesn't really believe in freedom as much. I feel great. I feel great. I feel great. Good.

• 29:19Tracy Alloway?

  You know what's actually, you know what I'm actually still really upset about is the politicization of cheap beer. Because I like both Coors Light and Bud Light, and, you know, I don't want to make a political statement when I go to a bar.

• 29:31Joe Weisenthal?

  Miller High Life is, uh, is the way through.

• 29:34Tracy Alloway?

  The neutral alternative.

• 29:35Joe Weisenthal?

  That's right.

• 29:40Joe Weisenthal?

  Lots More is produced by Carmen Rodriguez and Dashil Bennett with help from Moses Andam and Kale Brooks.

• 29:46Tracy Alloway?

  Our sound engineer is Blake Maples. Sage Baumann is the head of Bloomberg Podcasts.

• 29:51Joe Weisenthal?

  Please rate, review, and subscribe to Odd Lots and Lots More on your favorite podcast platforms.

• 29:57Tracy Alloway?

  And remember that Bloomberg subscribers can listen to all our podcasts ad-free by connecting through Apple Podcasts. Thanks for listening.